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Ukraine War Lies Debunked

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Ted Rall

For Senate Dems Pushing Weapons for Ukraine, Neo-Nazis Not Top of Mind

            Even the wars that historians judge to have been noble and beneficial rely on popular support marketed and sustained by lies. Contrary to what the English government told its people during World War I, German soldiers didn’t bayonet Belgian babies in their cribs. The “cocaine” U.S. troops claimed to have found in Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega’s home was nothing of the sort. The Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden – it was George W. Bush who refused to take him, because to accept would have denied him his excuse to invade Afghanistan.

As General and Director of British Military Intelligence John Charteris observed after World War I, “to make armies go on killing one another it is necessary to invent lies about the enemy.”

            America’s incipient proxy war against Russia over Ukraine is no exception to the rule. BS has been flying fast and furious as media outlets dutifully align behind the U.S. government war machine and the array of defense contractors that influence it. As usual, their purpose is clear: spook the American people into supporting a war in a country they hardly know anything about, take the side of a highly problematic regime and create a world of death and destruction for the benefit of greedy warmongers before the rubes/voters figure out they’ve been conned.

            Let’s take a look at some of the biggest lies being used to garner and prop up support for the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky:

            Lie #1: Ukraine is a democracy.

            Zelensky won the presidency in a fair election in 2019. But context is critical. The 2019 election was held in the immediate aftermath of a brutal coup d’état. In 2014 a violent mob comprising neo-Nazi extremist groups like the Azov Battalion and Right Sector, and covertly supported by the Obama Administration, forced President Viktor Yanukovych, democratically-elected and pro-Russian, to flee for his life.

            The new revolutionary government held an election in 2014, which Petro Poroshenko won. Zelensky is Ukraine’s second post-coup ruler.

            Here’s an analogy for Americans: instead of failing, Trump’s January 6th coup succeeds. Biden flees to Canada and, even though he lost, Trump serves a second term. Trump endorses Mike Pence in 2024. Pence wins that election. Is Pence a legitimate president? Is America a democracy?

            Democrats would answer no.. As do the 49% of Ukrainians, including many ethnic Russians, who voted for Yanukovych. They feel the same way about Zelensky, that he’s not legitimate. Which is why ethnic-Russian areas in the eastern Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk, declared independence and broke away from Ukraine after the 2014 coup, and ethnic-Russian Crimeans greeted Russian forces when they annexed the peninsula.

            To half its people, Ukraine doesn’t feel like a democracy.

            Lie #2: Ukraine is a free society.

            Ukraine is an authoritarian state with a veneer of democracy. Zelensky recently signed a decree ordering that all TV broadcasters in the country show the same exact government-controlled programming on every channel. “It’s important that the country has a unified information policy” under martial law, read the edict. This followed his banning of 11 rival political parties, threatening “a tough response” to politicians who disagree with him.

            Lest these repressive measures be excused as regrettable wartime excesses, Zelensky also banned three “pro-Russian” TV channels a year before Russia’s invasion “in order to protect national security,” his spokesperson said. An opposition politician and ally of the stations’ owner was locked under house arrest and accused of treason. Anti-government protesters in Zelensky’s Ukraine are brutally beaten and jailed. In May 2021 the mayor of Kiev said that Zelensky sent thugs from the Ukraine state security agency SBU to his apartment, where they demanded that he toe the line of Zelensky’s policies or else.

            “U.S. officials have long been fond of portraying Ukraine as a plucky democracy fending off the menace of aggression from an authoritarian Russia,” Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in 2021, before the war. “Washington’s idealized image has never truly corresponded with the murkier reality, but the gap has now become a chasm.”

            Lie #3: Ukraine is an ally that we have an obligation to defend.

            If Ukraine were a member of NATO, the United States would have a duty to defend it against Russia. But important members of the alliance like France and Germany oppose Ukrainian membership because it is riddled with corruption and not a full-fledged democracy. “In a 2020 analysis, Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, ranked Ukraine 117th out of 180 countries on its corruption index, lower than any NATO nation,” according to The New York Times.

            Ukraine is not a U.S. ally. It is in Russia’s sphere of influence every bit as much as Canada and Mexico are in ours. We have no historic or cultural ties to Ukraine.

            We have no legal or moral obligation whatsoever toward Ukraine.

            Lie #4: Russia’s attack was unprovoked.

            I’m not going to endorse Russia’s invasion. But arguing that the move was unprovoked is ridiculous. Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO, a Cold War-era relic formed as a U.S.-led military counterbalance to Russian influence in Europe. Ukraine has been shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions for years, killing an estimated 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians. Not only is Ukraine on Russia’s border, it’s the same exact route Nazi Germany took to invade the Soviet Union during World War II. Ukraine is Russia’s most vulnerable border — and it wants to join a heavily armed, nuclear-capable alliance of states determined to destroy Russia.

            Imagine, if you can, Mexico trying to join a Russian-led military alliance. How would we respond?

            Lie #5: The neo-Nazi thing is overblown Russian propaganda.

            Zelensky is Jewish; he lost family members in the Holocaust. How, goes the argument that concerns about right extremism are mere disinformation, could Ukraine and its government be heavily influenced by neo-Nazism? Well, Barack Obama was Black. Why is the American police still full of racists? Because the president of a country can only do so much. He governs the country he inherits, not the one he wants.

            Ukraine has a long and infamous history of far-right politics in which Nazism and anti-Semitism play a starring role. While it’s true that Europe and the United States also have such nasty groups, no other country in the world has as many as a percent of the population. None legitimizes Nazism and fascist collaboration during World War II the way that Ukraine does. “Ukraine is erecting new plaques and monuments to Nazi collaborators on a nearly weekly basis,” The Forward reported last year. Stefan Bandera, a notorious Nazi collaborator, is a national hero with numerous statues in his honor. France had Pétain and Norway had Quisling, but both are officially condemned.

And certainly no other country in the world has police and soldiers openly serving as Nazis, drawing government paychecks while wearing swastikas and other fascist insignia on duty.

            Most Ukrainians, arguably an overwhelming majority, are not pro-Nazi. However, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, including Zelensky and his government, are highly tolerant — to an obnoxious, intolerable degree — of Nazis serving openly in parliament, controlling a substantial portion of the police and national guard as well as the military. They allow neo-Nazis to control the historical narrative of their country, even elevating traitorous anti-Semites to founding heroes who deserve statues in the streets of major cities.

Lie #6: We have to do something.

It’s a big world. Misery abounds. At any given time there are invasions, proxy wars, regional conflict, civil strife and illegal occupations on almost every continent. Yemen is on fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict grinds on. Afghanistan is starving. Those are three cases where the United States is involved, as usual on the wrong side. There are dozens of other conflicts in which the United States has little to no interest. The only reason we are involved in Ukraine is because the media tells us to be.

It is entirely reasonable to look at the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and decide that it’s simply not our business, that neither side is worthy of support.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

 

Support People by Killing Other People

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Ted Rall

American politicians and television viewers have been deeply moved by images of the suffering people of Ukraine. Unfortunately, the main response has been to impose brutal sanctions on Russia that will destroy the Russian people but not their leaders, who are well insulated from the effect of sanctions. If humanitarianism is the point here, what about the people, the human beings, of Russia?

The House Always Wins

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Ted Rall

It is virtually inconceivable that Ukraine will be able to defeat Russia militarily. Russia is simply too powerful. So what’s the point of sending weapons to Ukraine? There can only be one net effect, to prolong the war and the suffering to the benefit of the defense industry.

Give Peace a Chance When Another Country Is Waging a War

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Ted Rall

Many Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, are protesting angrily about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the peaceniks-come-lately were nowhere to be found over the last two decades as the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, waged a brutal proxy war in Yemen and Syria, destroyed Libya and terrorized much of the world with assassination drone planes. When the US is the guilty party, citizens of the US are silently complicit. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Why Are We in so Deep for Ukraine?

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Ted Rall

The people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and many other countries destroyed by US military forces never enjoyed the sympathetic media coverage, much less the humanization, that Ukrainians are getting during the Russian invasion. To the contrary, Afghan patriots who shot at American forces were portrayed as terrorists and enemy combatants. Why the difference?

Afghanistan, Not Ukraine, Is the Biggest Humanitarian Crisis

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Ted Rall

            Maybe it’s time to change the flag on your social-media avatar.

            To the extent that objective guideposts exist in international relations, the United States has no legal obligation to defend Ukraine. Ukraine, a U.S. strategic partner, is neither an ally nor a member of NATO. Nor is it in our neighborhood. Much as the Monroe Doctrine declares the entire Western hemisphere under American sway, Russia has long declared all the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine, to belong to its “sphere of privileged interest.”

            Despite our newfound obsession with a nation two out of three Americans couldn’t find on a map last month, American journalists and ordinary citizens have been so moved by scenes of death and destruction that members of both major parties have quickly come together to declare that they #StandWithUkraine, want to welcome Ukrainian war refugees, favor sending advanced weapons to aid Ukraine in its defense and support an array of harsh sanctions against Russia so wide-reaching that they ban Russian opera singers, paralympians and cats.

            Headlines aside, Ukraine is not the most miserable place on earth right now. And the cruelest inflictor of human pain isn’t Russia.

It’s the United States.

            “Afghanistan has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis,” Jane Ferguson reported in The New Yorker in January. “More than 20 million people are on the brink of famine.”

            “Afghanistan,” says the U.N. World Food Program, “teeters on the brink of universal poverty. As much as 97% of the population is at risk of sinking below the poverty line.”

            The afghani, the national currency, has lost 30% of value since the American withdrawal last August—a collapse so precipitous that the U.N. worries that a liquidity crisis is imminent. Money exchanges in major Afghan cities have ceased operations, portending a return to the cashless subsistence economy, based on barter, that prevailed before the 2001 U.S. invasion, when Afghanistan was officially designated a failed state. Imports, which make up a high percentage of consumer goods, have been soaring in price as unemployment has shot up following the cessation of international aid that accounted for more than 40% of GDP. UNICEF warns that up to one million children under age five may die from malnutrition and lack of essential services by the end of 2022.

            Schoolchildren are taught outside in the snow because schools can’t afford electricity for lights. Desperate Afghans are selling daughters and their own kidneys (going rate $1500) to survive.

            “U.S. politicians and media frequently treat Afghanistan these days like a TV series that had its finale in 2021,” observes James Downie of The Washington Post. “But Afghans’ suffering is very much ongoing, and American decisions continue to make it worse.” With all eyes on Ukraine, no one is paying attention to the graver situation in Afghanistan—even though (or because?) the spiralizing disaster there is largely our fault.

            1.4 million Ukrainian refugees have fled; 200,000 are internally displaced. Compare that to Afghanistan: 2.2 million Afghans have gone to neighboring countries in the last six months and 3.5 million are internally displaced.

 

            Even if we don’t exactly care about the people of Afghanistan, what about self-interest? It’s curious strange that we’ve already forgotten that an unstable, impoverished Afghanistan can pose a danger to the region and the world.

            Downie notes: “That famine is a direct consequence of the United States’ failure to create a self-sustaining economy there over two decades.” During the occupation we created a kleptocracy by dumping billions of dollars on pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills into the hands of corrupt government officials, connected oligarchs and warlords while small entrepreneurs were shaken down for protection money. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” an American official told The New York Times, “was the United States.”

            Coverage of the Afghans’ plight, such as it is, focuses on the $7 billion to $9.5 billion held by the former Afghanistan government in U.S. banks, now frozen by the Biden Administration, which stubbornly refuses to recognize the reality of Taliban rule.

Biden wants to siphon off $3.5 billion of the Afghan funds to settle legal claims by the families of 9/11 victims, a bizarre stance given the fact that no Afghan national had anything to do with the terrorist attacks. The remaining monies, says the president, will only be released to the Taliban after they allow girls to attend school, guarantee universal human rights, form an inclusive government and promise to sever all ties with terrorist groups.

            The Taliban say they’re open to negotiations, but none have been scheduled.

            While the White House dithers, babies are starving to death in Afghan hospitals without medicine.

            Biden’s statements border on fantasy. “[The money] is not going to the Taliban; it is going to be used for the benefit of the Afghan people,” an anonymous White House official told the Post. The U.S. government couldn’t control the fate of aid money to Afghanistan while occupying with tens of thousands of soldiers. Now we’re gone, without a single embassy or consulate in the whole country.

            Like it or not, the Taliban is the government of Afghanistan. They will rule the country for the foreseeable future. There is no realistic way to help the Afghan people without recognizing their government, lifting sanctions and restoring the flow of aid money.

            Now, in the middle of an especially harsh winter in a mountainous country whose meager agricultural operations are disproportionately impacted by climate change, there is no time to lose. The U.S. should offer a helping hand immediately, without preconditions.

Give Afghanistan its money back.

We can set deadlines for the Taliban to meet U.S. benchmarks on women’s rights and other issues, stating that non-compliance will mean there will be no resumption of aid.

Even if the Taliban spend its billions carefully, it won’t last long in a country of 40 million people. Over the coming years, the U.S. has a moral obligation as well as a vested interest to help Taliban-ruled Afghanistan transition from a bloated welfare state dependent upon foreign aid to a modern, developing, independent economy.

            Whether or not we relate more easily to blonde European Christians than darker-skinned Central Asian Muslims, back-burnering the U.S.-made catastrophe in Afghanistan in favor of the more telegenic mayhem in Ukraine is unconscionable.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

 

 

Everyone Has an Opinion about Covid

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Ted Rall

I became sick and tested positive for COVID-19 on December 30. Within hours, everyone was expressing a strong opinion about it. Not that anyone was changing their mind about anything.

This Is the Military! No Violence Allowed!

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Ted Rall

The US military has announced an initiative to root out violent extremism within its ranks. Of course, violence and extremism are the very core of what it means to be in the military.

The Difference between Democrats and Republicans Equals Zero

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Ted Rall

Democrats often ask progressives: how can you say that there’s no difference between Democrats and the Republican party? While there are differences of tone, on the most important issues there is little to no difference in policy. And Congressional votes reflect that.

Not Everyone Feels Bad about Military Suicides

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Ted Rall

Military suicides among active-duty personnel continue to increase. It’s hardly surprising that some of the people who volunteer to kill innocent people feel guilty enough to end their lives. The mystery is why so many veterans don’t feel guilty.

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